News and Insight for Sales Leaders by Gerhard Gschwandtner

Sales Enablement

12/01/2016

Today’s post is by Gilad Raichshtain, founder and CEO of Implisit, a Salesforce company.

If you’re a salesperson, you’re always trying to beat your quota. To do this, you need to answer several hard questions, such as: “Will my deal close?”; “Am I focusing my time on the right deals?”; and, “What else can I do to increase the likelihood to win this deal?”

Answering these questions takes selling with data science. And data science is no longer just about analyzing customer and prospect data from emails, phone calls, product usage, etc. Data science can now tap deeper by applying other technologies such as text mining and voice transcribing – and analyzing the content of your communications as well as the context for each activity. The results of these analyses are tailor-made insights that will help you close more deals and faster. And the beauty of it is that it’s all automatic, simple, and – in more and more cases – is reaching accuracy better than humans.

By now, you’re used to hearing about data science. And the smartest salespeople are already showing its promise with their results. These savvy salespeople are using customer data like athletes who study their health data and analyze every move they made during a game – helping them improve their techniques, create a plan for success, and, ultimately, win.

Here are some of the best ways salespeople are using data science to beat their competition.

1. Upgrade to a Smarter Inbox

Before selling with data science, smart emails used to mean simple auto-reply templates. Now, some salespeople are taking the meaning of smart emails to a whole new level by answering the question: “How can I get creative with the thousands of emails I send to prospects each month?"

With customer data, salespeople are eliminating blind auto-replies. Smart inboxes combine customer data with email history to suggest the right email for a potential customer based on the salesperson’s specific history with that customer and where that customer is in the sales lifecycle. Even if you get the same reply from two different customers, a smart inbox would recommend two personalized emails for you to send back based on your history with these customers. Plus, a smart inbox would auto-log these emails so you don’t have to manually do this.

Another capability of smart inboxes is insight into your calendar. For example, let’s say you send a colleague an email with three dates you are free for a meeting. Your colleague opens this email hours after you send it, and, in that time, you’ve booked up one of those dates. With a smart inbox, your email to your colleague would automatically reflect the changes on your calendar, so your colleague would see only your most up-to-date availability.

2. Predict Which Prospects Will Become Customers

Wouldn’t it be great if you could accurately predict the numbers for a winning lottery ticket? If you’re a salesperson, you often feel this way with customers, wishing you could predict the likelihood your email or phone call is the winning ticket to securing your prospect’s business. With data science, this is within reach.

Today, companies can analyze the history of leads that have converted into customers and build the DNA of a prospect most likely to become a customer. The historical analysis would take into account the number of employees at the prospect, their geography, their seniority level, and thousands of other features to determine the likelihood of closing a deal. This helps sales development reps understand which deals they should prioritize early in the sales process.

3. Get an Intelligent Sales Assistant

It’s great if you’re a salesperson who knows which leads to focus on, but how do you know the steps to take to convert these leads into customers? Enter the intelligent sales assistant. This is a sales rep’s guide through each stage of a company’s sales process and helps reps stay focused on important tasks so they can close deals quickly.

For example, a sales rep using an intelligent assistant that logs a call to a prospect may get a pop-up notification that reminds the rep to follow up with the customer in a week – along with detailed context around other actions that should take place to move the deal forward.

New technology has definitely made data science more useful and less intimidating for entire sales organizations. Now, teams of all sizes and industries can easily detect patterns, find correlations, and make predictions that help sales rep sell faster, sell smarter, and knock quotas out of the park.

Ask just about any sales expert today what the future holds for those of us engaged in selling, and the answer will be some combination of, “The outside sales rep is going the way of the dinosaurs,” and, “Automation will take over much of what sales reps do today.”

SpaceX/Tesla/SolarCity founder and futurist Elon Musk’s recent comments don’t give us much comfort, either. He says artificial intelligence (AI) will eventually replace us all, and we’ll all be on government support.

Pretty dire stuff. But is that really what AI portends for our future? Actually, no.

AI is already here, already a part of the sales function. And it’s here to make our jobs easier and us far more effective. Salesforce is injecting AI into its platform to help sales teams identify their best opportunities and best timing for new sales. Conversica provides an automated sales assistant that uses deep learning to automate follow-up and identify hot leads. And x.ai has given us “Amy,” the AI assistant that sets up meetings.

I’m one of the lucky ones who’ve had the opportunity to “work” with Amy over the past year. And the experience has been quite positive. The process of setting up meetings is tedious – we all know that. But the art of setting up a meeting is also quite delicate. Amy handles all of it with the poise and professionalism of an experienced, $100K-a-year executive assistant. After a while, it’s hard to even think of Amy (or Andrew, if you prefer) as an app, because the experience feels more like having a relationship than using a machine.

In the interview below, I spoke with x.ai founder Dennis Mortenson on the occasion of the launch of their professional edition of Amy. If you’re worried about what the future holds for the sales profession, let Dennis – and Amy – set your mind at ease. AI is here, and it needs to be part of your toolset now.

11/15/2016

These days, almost every professional sports team uses a tablet as their official playbook. This is because sports teams recognize the way we learn: We need to practice and re-learn on multiple occasions before we fully comprehend.

Having a great sales playbook, filled with the collective wisdom of your all-star reps, can be the difference between winning and losing in today’s highly competitive markets – as long as you can get your team to properly leverage it.

Al Saunders, the celebrated NFL coach, achieved staggering results throughout his career by doing anything and everything he could to get his teams to study, internalize, and fall back on the team’s playbook. There were even famous stories of him going around and secretly leaving $100 bills in the middle of each player’s copy so he could later check which ones were missing the money to know who was studying it!

Thankfully, in the world of enterprise sales, there is already the built-in mechanism of performance-based compensation to get sales reps to want to study and practice. The challenge lies in consistently generating and delivering relevant content to them in a format that will allow them to do so effectively.

YouTube Meets TED Talks

Best-in-class sales organizations are already finding that the key to being able to consistently generate and share the most relevant content – in a timely and cost-effective way – is to leverage the one technology that allows you to review your pitches, receive point-in-time coaching and feedback from managers, and even meet face-to-face with someone even if they’re a thousand miles away: video.

This has been true in the world of professional sports teams for decades as well. In fact, Patriots quarterback Tom Brady watches 17 hours of video each week – reviewing plays, seeing what worked and what didn’t, and coming up with strategies for improvement for the next big game. This process of study and review, of watching and critiquing our own performance – and that of our peers – is crucial for all of us to understand, whether we are professional athletes or salespeople.

In sales, who wouldn’t want a best practice library of up-to-date, highly relevant, and peer-generated content? Using short, bite-sized videos created by an organization’s own reps has allowed best-in-class sales teams to flourish in a way that has never been possible before. When you collaborate with the right people at the right time, you improve the odds that you will win.

Reps record a video on their phone or tablet of their best pitch for a specific product and upload it so their managers can review. Then, managers highlight the “top gun” videos the entire team will be tasked with emulating. Today’s technology makes this simple, easy, secure, and amazingly fast.

This has the effect of creating a sort of “corporate YouTube” of best practices and procedures for all the most common challenges specific to an individual company’s sales team – essentially, a self-updating, YouTube-style sales playbook filled with the kind of distilled, high-relevance content you would get with a TED Talk.

Video is the New Document

Jim Lundy, founder and CEO of AragonResearch, has said “video is the new document.” His research centers around cases similar to the one described above, as well as the overall rise of video in all facets of sales. This has led him to the hypothesis that video content growth will overtake regular content by mid-year 2018.

Sales teams are not only accelerating top-line growth by using video content platforms to better train and coach; they are using those very same toolsto massively save time and T&E expenses associated with onboarding new reps and certifying reps for new product rollouts. All of this – in combination with the fact that mobile devices have made video creation easier than ever before – is contributing to widespread adoption of video technologies across sales organizations in all industries.

10/27/2016

Sales organizations of all sizes value predictability in their pipelines, as this ability to forecast future revenue impacts all strategic decisions surrounding the company – from hiring plans to reinvestment in the business.

Making these predictions accurately requires the ability to control the sales process and assess the likelihood that the deals in progress will close. While that’s typically the role of the sales reps and their managers, there are ways the IT team can support that mission – allowing reps themselves to prioritize the deals they have in flight, better determine how to move them along to the next stage, or flag those that need more of their attention.

IT teams specialize in maintaining and implementing technological solutions for the betterment of the organization, so there’s a match made in heaven for sales teams that suffer from antiquated procedures and tool sets when newer options exist.

1. Facilitate Sales and Marketing Alignment

One of the first things IT can do is help ensure there is alignment between sales and marketing to create a better path for tracking and managing the deal stage of leads and prospects. As the line between these two departments increasingly blurs, it’s more important than ever that everyone is speaking the same language. The marketing half of a lead’s journey – from the initial conversion to a contact, and later an MQL and SQL – can quickly move into the sales side as they work through the exploratory stages and closer to buy-in from decision makers. Establishing these (and other incremental) stages in the process can then be used to determine a corresponding likelihood to close and, when coupled with the deal value, allows organizations using a CRM or some form of tracking to gain additional insight into their pipeline.

2. Research Technology Worth Purchasing and Implement It

With the process and procedure nailed down, IT teams can lean on some of the technology at their disposal to implement sales enablement tools. A wide variety of these tools exist with a range of capabilities, but aggregated review sites like G2 Crowd can help illuminate the best fit for your needs. While the potential use cases are virtually limitless, some of the common desires are for improved marketing automation and lead nurturing.

How this takes shape will often depend on the sophistication of your sales and marketing process, but can include everything from better email nurturing to triggered outreach events and content personalized to the viewer on the Website. Imagine, for example, how your sales team would respond to receiving a notification that a lead they’d been working was currently viewing the pricing page on a Website and might be ripe for a call. Similarly, the ability to understand how and when their messaging is resonating with prospects by knowing when old emails are re-opened or links are clicked is well within the feature range of some email clients and tool extensions.

3. Build Tools that Complement the Sales Process

While the core of an IT team’s responsibility is integrating disparate systems to ensure the compatibility of everything in their arsenal, this isn’t always constrained to off-the-shelf products and might include a few custom tools. Some teams have the ability to create these from scratch, whereas others prefer the DIY sandbox environment of a platform like SnapApp – but creating tools that can add value to prospects during their evaluation stage can help accelerate the process for the sales team.

In this instance the only limits are on the imagination, so work with marketing and sales to figure out where the potential lies – but interactive questionnaires, ROI calculators, or product configurators are examples of modules that can help everyone involved in the transaction.

4. Simplify the End-of-Funnel Process for End Users

Consider the problem that e-commerce companies frequently worry about – where shopping cart abandonment represents enormous chunks of lost revenue. A similar problem can arise when snags come up in more considered B2B purchases and – given the average deal size – it's imperative that, when a prospect is ready to buy, there are no barriers in their path.

Creating an easier purchasing process is an area of potential refinement for many sales teams. While a unique payment link and the opportunity to use a credit card is an easy process that mirrors the online purchases most of us make in our personal lives, this isn’t always feasible for enterprise solutions. Even still, there are a host of document e-signature tools to manage contracts, which are especially helpful when sign-off needs to come from different people throughout an organization, or even different offices.

Taking strides to create an easier procurement process can help remove friction at the finish line, where neglect can also do the most damage, but the broader goal aligns with every stage in the sales cycle. The motivation for everyone involved should be to give sales and marketing as much information as possible about their prospects, be able to seamlessly provide value back to them, and strike while the iron is hot. The better armed an IT department can make the client-facing teams, the more dangerous and efficient they’ll be when they’re finally in front of prospects.

09/27/2016

Today’s post is by Ben Noble, NewVoiceMedia communications manager of North America. He specializes in contact center technology and has a deep understanding of inside sales and customer service markets.

A successful business is more than just delivering a great product. Whatever your company offers, chances are you aren’t the only one offering it – and, if you are, competition is surely hot on your trail.

Globalization has opened the competitive landscape. In fact, shopping local is almost a misnomer now. The Internet has blurred borders, and virtually anyone can sell from anywhere.

So what keeps your business afloat? How do you snag the soapbox when so many are shouting for attention?

Today, how you sell and service your product is almost as important as the product itself. Communication channels and brand identities have melded into one. Companies that master customer interaction and experience are hailed through word of mouth and outperform competition.

In a recent NewVoiceMedia study, survey respondents indicated they would be more loyal (70 percent), would recommend businesses to others (65 percent), would use businesses more frequently (43 percent), and would spend more money (40 percent) if provided with better customer service.

Similarly, a study from CEB proved that 94 percent of customers will repeat buy from companies that provide low-effort service experience.

One brand = 1 conversation.

Today, customers talk. They skip commercials, they Google product reviews, and they chat with 1,000 of their closest friends online to determine what they want to buy. They are the computer generation, and – though their phone, email, and social media seem like vastly different channels – customers see them in unison as “their voice.”

Customers want you to talk with them, not at them. And, just like they view every one of their channels as an extension of their voice, they see every conversation with a company as a personal interaction.

For many, the interaction is broken, fragmented, and a source of frustration. In the above-mentioned NewVoiceMedia study, researchers explain how – on the inbound side – customers are often dissuaded from calling businesses, citing the following conversational obstacles: having to repeat info to multiple agents (49 percent), having to wait on hold (41 percent), or having to navigate multiple menus (39 percent).

It’s complicated.

Modern sales are driven largely by relationships. To forge relationships, companies must humanize their brand. To humanize their brand, companies must unify their voice across all channels. For some, this is problematic…

“Supporting multiple customer contact channels creates issues for companies, chief among them the imperative to provide consistent information across all channels. To be able to deliver a seamless customer experience they must integrate their channels of communication, share all available information among the employees and systems handling interactions, apply the same rules in all of them so that responses are consistent as well as personalized, and maintain context as customers shift across touch points.” – Ventana Research

To win customers, your company must become a single entity.

It’s pretty difficult to move and speak as one when your company is divided into departments. Without the right tools, it’s virtually impossible. Modern customers have needs that can be met only with agile technology.

Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms are today’s conversation dashboard. Platforms like Salesforce offer companies visibility that extends across all areas of their business. Applications like those from the AppExchange can further connectivity and weld together conversations. Tools like computer telephony integration (CTI) and omnichannel monitoring can augment your platform to become the herald of all your brand interactions.

Basically, if you haven’t invested in a CRM solution, your business is lagging.

It might not be obvious yet, but, if your company is not operating with customer relationship management as a top priority, you will lose money. The modern market is about customer experience, and patrons will gladly trade your product for a competitor that provides clearer, more coordinated communication.

Don’t want to fall behind?

Make sure your company has a platform that provides visibility across all areas of the business. Find a CRM platform that can accommodate everything from sales to service to marketing.

Tether your communications to your CRM solution. Look at CTI providers that can offer call analytics, note transcription, and omnichannel connections so every conversation you have with a customer is tracked, documented, and referenced.

Create a smarter approach for sales and service by tailoring messages and offerings to individuals based on their needs and wants. Treat every customer as unique, preserve their business, and gain their allegiance.

03/23/2016

Today’s guest post is by Karen McCandless, editor of the GetApp blog and writer for the GetApp Lab. GetApp is a Gartner company, which is the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company.

Do your salespeople feel more like data-entry clerks than sales professionals? Are they spending most of their time documenting their activities rather than focusing on selling? As a manager, are you spending hours managing your sales pipeline and forecast in Excel? Does communication with your customers feel like a mess – with key clients receiving pitches from different salespeople while other customers get no response at all?

If these statements sound familiar, it’s time to invest in sales management software. Fortunately, you have many options. Here are four questions to better understand how to choose the best sales management software for your organization.

“What should I look for in a sales management app?”

Sales management apps have come a long way since the days of being slightly more complex versions of spreadsheets. Key functionalities to look for include the following.

Sales analytics

Lead/contact management

Email integration

Sales forecasting

Pricing optimization

Predictive analytics

Collaboration

Reporting

There are many other features that can help increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales processes, but the most important task is to identify what is must-have, what is optional, or what is unnecessary for your team. While you could choose software from a market leader with all the bells and whistles, if you’re not going to use half of the features, you’re wasting your time and money.

“Which benefits will persuade my finance team to sign off on purchasing sales-management software?”

It’s not always easy to convince your finance department to fork out for a new piece of software. Aside from the obvious benefits software can offer – making it easier for your sales staff to do their job and for your customers to do business with you – there are at least three points that can help you make your case to the finance team.

Sales management software can automate a whole host of time-consuming manual tasks; this will free you up to concentrate on the more important jobs at hand.

By getting better visibility into all activities through reporting functionality, you can better identify what is going wrong (and right) and act accordingly, with the added bonus of better forecasting.

You will also be able to better manage your pricing strategy through pricing optimization functionalities; and pulling in information from your email system will ensure smooth and transparent communication with your clients.

“Should I build or buy software?”

Once you’ve got an idea of what you’re looking for and how it will help your business, it’s important to consider whether you should purchase software from an external company or have it custom made.

These days, the benefits of choosing a cloud-based sales management solution tend to outweigh the advantages of custom-built software. This is because SaaS deployments:

Cut down on implementation and training time

Reduce the burden on IT support

Enable more predictable pricing

Provide better scalability, allowing you to add or remove licenses on demand.

“What other factors should I consider?”

Look into rankings. You can see GetApp’s quarterly ranking of the top 25 sales management apps to get an objective snapshot of your software options.

Consider integrations. No app will work in isolation, so investigating whether your sales management solution integrates well with other software you already use – such as HR or accounting – is also crucial.

Keep mobility in mind. Having a sales management mobile app is key to enable anytime, anywhere working and staying in touch with clients on the go.

Read reviews. Find out what other users think of the app you’re considering. This will help you form a more rounded opinion. Maybe an app is better for enterprises, more suited to technical users, or is a good fit for a particular industry.

If you’ve already been through this process – and now have great sales management software in your business – let us know how you chose it in the comments below.

01/27/2016

Today’s post is by Wendy Mack, director of consulting services for Wilson Learning Corporation. She has more than 20 years of experience in sales effectiveness, leadership, and organizational development arenas. She has co-authored three books on the topics of learning, leadership, and change.

In working with sales organizations around the globe, I have found that everyone wants a piece of the sales force. Internal functions such as marketing, training and development, R&D, and sales operations all have information they want to get out to sales. When these functions aren’t working together, the result tends to be costly chaos.

When working with companies, I ask three questions to help them assess whether this is an issue for them. Consider if any of the following are true for you:

Are various internal functions competing for your salespeople’s time?

Are your salespeople receiving conflicting messages from different sources?

Is time being wasted in training that doesn’t drive sales?

A Better Way – Sales Enablement

As we have all seen over the past few years, more and more companies have sought to address the information overload problem by establishing sales enablement functions. The emphasis on sales enablement grew out of what Harvard Business Review calls “the notoriously fraught relationship between sales and marketing.” As companies sought solutions for aligning sales and marketing to drive better revenue results, people started to talk about how marketing and other functions could and should enable sales.

I have encountered numerous and varying definitions of sales enablement. We view sales enablement as:

An approach that bridges the gap between the sales strategy and execution and provides the sales force with all of the information and resources they need to generate revenue.

An effective sales enablement function allows you to be deliberate and strategic in managing how information is transmitted and accessed. Of course, it’s one thing to call a person or team “sales enablement” – it’s another to actually have a positive impact on sales performance.

What Enablement Isn’t

Sales enablement is a relatively new term and many companies make the mistake of applying the new term to old ways of doing things. They rename “sales training” to “sales enablement” or they decide to create more mobile or technology-assisted selling tools and call it sales enablement. The reality is that learning and technology are important to sales enablement, but they are only parts of the equation. Focusing on any one element in a vacuum is likely to produce limited results.

A Systems View of Sales Enablement

Based on our ongoing work in the arena of sales effectiveness, we have identified four elements that must be aligned and fully integrated for any sales enablement approach to be fully effective:

Sales processes and systems

Information and resources

Learning strategy

Leadership practices

When these elements are aligned in support of a clear go-to-market strategy and consistent vision for the customer experience, organizations can:

Speed time-to-productivity for new hires

Minimize disruption of both sales and sales support functions

Reduce time out of the field

Ensure consistent messages to the market, regardless of channel

Positively impact customers’ perception of their experience

Integrating these elements requires cross-functional dialogue, shared commitments, agreements, and accountability among multiple functions. Sales executives do not need to be experts in marketing, technology, and training. However, it is critical that they drive and facilitate alignment and coordination across all of the functions and people who support sales. We think Harvard’s Cespedes and Gartner’s Bova make the point well: “The cross-functional communication and coordination that is required to navigate this change is the job of leadership.” Let Me Leave You with This

An effective sales enablement approach can yield increases in sales as well as cost savings. Done well, it will reduce redundancies, eliminate time spent searching for information and resources, and limit time spent out of the field. Done poorly, sales enablement is just another fad that will disappoint and then disappear.

12/15/2015

Today's post is by Scott Eidle, an evangelist for sales best practices, including sales process, enablement, and operations. He leverages more than 20 years of sales and marketing experience to share insight about the top trends in the software and technology sales space, and is currently a global sales enablement executive for an enterprise software company.

With the iPad® Pro™ hitting the market, companies will once again try to figure out if and how they can incorporate a cool, exciting piece of technology into their sales programs…and the concept of BYOD (bring your own device) will likely get serious considerations as a cheap and fast alternative to laying out a lot of cash for yet another piece of hardware. But are the results worth it?

In my opinion, no. Many companies should just forget about BYOD tablet programs and focus on other ways to support their field sales teams. Here are four reasons why.

Reason #1: Most BYOD programs have 30 percent participation rates.

I’ve had first-hand experience with sales-enablement professionals at world-class, enterprise sales organizations that had attempted BYOD programs for tablets. These clients set the standards for excellent sales operations and were implementing methodical, tested rollout strategies. They had great ideas and a fair amount of money. And the resounding results reported by their sales enablement and operations executives? A 30 percent participation rate. Of that 30 percent, user engagement was never high enough for them to consider even their 30 percent as active participants in the programs. If companies operating at this level get these results, other companies can probably expect even less.

Reason #2: BYOD programs come with hidden costs.

It starts off with best intentions. “Let’s give the sales teams iPads! They will rock in front of customers! We’ll be so much more impressive than our competitors!” The enthusiasm is great, but most of these intentions end up on the cutting-room floor when budgets get down to the nitty-gritty.

The reality is that fully-connected iPads will double your costs in terms of technology support. This is for various reasons:

No one buys an iPad to replace their field laptops,

iPads aren’t cheap to begin with,

Wireless programs for iPad data are expensive, and

You need special programs to adequately present all those Microsoft® PowerPoint® presentations you’ve created over the years.

Reason #3: The iPad is too “personal.”

Most people view their phones and iPads in different lights. While a phone is a personal device, we also use it to call, email, or text our professional colleagues and contacts. (This is why the business world has learned to accept brief responses, misspellings, and the occasional funny autocorrect when we see the “sent from my iPhone” line at the end of an email.)

By contrast, the iPad is a symbol of escape – relaxing, browsing at one’s leisure, everything that is associated with avoiding work. Expecting anyone to willingly and intentionally use an iPad for doing yet more work is just a fantasy.

Reason #4: Real business is still done on Windows, and it’s just not that easy to do real work on an iPad.

Even with the introduction of the iPad Pro, which is taking huge strides to make itself more like a Windows® Surface™ machine, trying to conduct business on an iPad just isn’t that easy. The apps don’t work the same way they do on a laptop – no matter how they are advertised – and, while word processing and typing emails has gotten much better (thank you, third-party keypads!), trying to do anything with an Excel spreadsheet or a PowerPoint presentation is just an awful experience. And let’s not forget that the majority of salespeople are not the best at paperwork or PowerPointing anyway! You don’t want to add the frustration of trying to finger-tap an Excel box on their screen or move and resize a graphic in a presentation. I understand that operations and enablement teams want to help salespeople and make their lives easier. But, given all these considerations, I think it’s best to steer clear of BYOD programs and invest in other forms of support.

10/20/2015

Today's post is by Scott Eidle, an evangelist for sales best practices, including sales process, enablement, and operations. He leverages more than 20 years of sales and marketing experience to share insight about the top trends in the software and technology sales space, and is currently a global sales enablement executive for an enterprise software company.

Investing in Salesforce.com has become the mark of a truly committed sales organization. Regardless of the quality of your implementation, or how well your sales team actually uses it, the investment tells the rest of the world (and your reps) that you intend to run a high-performance organization.

What started as a simple premise – providing salespeople with easy-to-access information about their prospects and clients so they can more easily focus on the job of selling – has matured into a complex maze of bolt-ons, point solutions, and customization strategies that have made managing Salesforce.com a complex endeavor. If you live in a Salesforce.com world, you experience the benefits – as well as the pitfalls – of balancing this power and complexity on a daily basis.

The Salesforce.com ecosystem consists of customers, the apps in the App Exchange, partners, and developers. Dreamforce (the annual Salesforce.com convention held in San Francisco every fall) puts the entire Salesforce.com ecosystem on display. What Dreamforce also has done is highlight the complexities of working with the Salesforce.com ecosystem to provide these benefits. Here are some of the best and worst parts of working with that ecosystem to achieve your objectives.

The Best

Whatever the hottest topic is – or whatever the newest trend will be – you’ll see it in the form of ecosystem partners. Some of these topics and partners from past years include marketing automation (Marketo), cloud storage of documents (Box, Dropbox), CPQ or configure-price-quote systems (BigMachines, Steelbrick), and a focus on inside sales teams (InsideSales.com). Partners that get promotions from Salesforce.com are usually good investments for improving your organization (depending on your specific needs, of course).

The ecosystem partners can help your company implement these improvement programs at a rapid clip. They have already implemented these programs, and – with that experience – are able to quickly bring best practices to your teams. Most of these best practices are programs and initiatives that sales leaders want to emphasize throughout their sales ranks anyway, but spending money with an ecosystem partner provides a point of focus for every level of the organization to rally around and emphasize their intended results.

Using systems written and supported by the ecosystem – which you can find on Salesforce.com’s partner showcase called the AppExchange – can drastically reduce your dependency on your own company’s IT resources. Trying to replicate the same outcome with your own resources – the time, money, and effort from your IT organization, which also won't have the expertise these singularly focused vendors will have – can be a difficult and painful process. Too often the plans that involve any IT customizations will get caught up in resource scarcity issues, causing delays and headaches to everyone who has to barter for the dedicated focus from the IT department required to implement a new program; and, as with any custom software project, “custom” can also be used as a synonym for “difficult to maintain.”

Spending money with an ecosystem partner places that responsibility with the partner, who has a vested interest in keeping clients happy at the risk of bad publicity.

The Worst

Salesforce.com implementations are usually not “vanilla” enough to simply plug and play every ecosystem solution into them. While the emphasis for most SaaS solutions is focused on configuration and not customization, it’s the personalization of each company’s configuration that can cause headaches when trying to plug in a complementary product. One of the most common configuration roadblocks tends to be the screen design of system pages – having too many or too few fields or sections can make it difficult to display additional widgets when you are effectively competing for screen space. And the rule of thumb is that, if your salesperson cannot see the widget on their opening display (that is, what they are able to read at their first glance when reaching that page) – they are less likely to leverage that tool.

A new power-broker has emerged as a major gatekeeper for all ecosystem projects: your company’s Salesforce.com Administrator. The “SFDC Admin” has a huge responsibility to your organization – one that is not taken lightly; it’s this person’s job to make sure the system operates as planned and provides you with the results you expect. This has evolved into an almost Herculean task. They have to have protect the overall vision of the system and weigh the requests of different sales team executives. They are also the ones tasked with the responsibility of ensuring that any ecosystem project operates as planned and, more importantly, doesn’t negatively impact any of the existing configurations in your instance. The result is that, while most SFDC Admins can’t make the decision to buy a complementary system, they can absolutely stall or kill an ecosystem implementation if the risks outweigh the reward. (Note: I LOVE SFDC ADMINS! Please don't think otherwise. The point here is that they have been thrust into an unenviable position where they must be the voice of reason to every project being thrown at them – and too few salespeople have the foresight to include them in the discussions instead of hoping they will excitedly approve every project.)

Salesforce.com has a growing focus on providing IT departments with the ability to write custom programs that mimic ecosystem systems. With the introduction of Force.com programming capabilities, it’s become a common “Build vs. Buy” discussion every time a sales leader wants to purchase something from the ecosystem. What was once the cornerstone promise of the Salesforce.com SaaS approach – to “remove the sales team’s dependency on their company’s IT resources” – has come full circle at many companies, where the IT departments have invested efforts into Force.com projects. The question then becomes: “Can we do it? Yes. But should we do it? Well, that depends… .”" As mentioned before, anything “custom” requires a full commitment to the time, resources, and energy of not only writing those programs but also providing ongoing support for them – a commitment that is difficult to maintain for any company.

Do you have questions about the Salesforce.com ecosystem? Stories to share? Leave your thoughts in the comments section.

09/30/2015

With only a few hours remaining in the quarter, sales teams are frantically calling, emailing, texting and employing miscellaneous acts of heroics to get deals done. It’s a scramble that all of us in B-to-B have witnessed, and one that we've at one point or another committed to never doing again. However, all too often the pattern repeats itself, and sales teams dial and email everyone in CRM to find and land that “flier” deal to make the quarter.

Don’t call everyone. It doesn’t work, and it’s a waste of time.

Buyers are sharing precious insights with every opened email, view of a shared presentation or proposal and even forwarding the proposed contract. These digital signals identify which deals are active and provide a tremendous first cut at prioritizing which buyers to call first and which deals have a shot at coming in to close the quarter.

Even deals once written off as “dead” hold value. In past couple of days, we saw a buyer in a deal we thought was lost begin to interact with a TinderBox sales proposal. The buyer returned to products and pricing pages, so our sales team reached out, provided insight, and it looks like we’re going to earn the business this quarter. It’s a great win, and a solid validation that prioritizing engagement is more about the buyer than the salesperson.

Here are three ways to ensure you connect with the right buyers first:

1. Listen to buyers. The highest potential buyers are identifying themselves through every online interaction. Use engagement information and analytics from marketing automation systems like Pardot, Marketo and Eloqua, along with sales technologies like TinderBox and Yesware to make it easy to identify the digital signals buyers send when they interact with content like sales proposals and contracts.

2. Prioritize the most engaged buyers. It’s important to remember that a buyer is more often a group of people rather than a single decision maker. Prioritize calls and emails to accounts where buyers are actively reviewing, forwarding and revisiting the contract. Even better – prioritize follow up to accounts where those with authority to sign a contract are actively engaged.

3. Make it easier to say "yes." Every second counts for both you and your buyer. Use esignature technologies like DocuSign in your contracts and make it easy for prospects to sign from any device, anywhere. Making the signature process digital also reduces the chance for errors and keeps CRM updated with every acceptance.

Prioritizing the right buyer at the right time is essential to make the final sprint to close the quarter a success. Understanding where buyers are in their journey, how they’re engaging and what’s most important to them, gives sales teams the information they need to prioritize the deals most likely to close. While technology has advanced to make identifying and acting upon digital insights possible, they’re only signals. It’s the sales professional that ultimately gets deals done and makes a successful quarter possible.